INTEGRATED SELF SYSTEM: A MICROGENETIC APPROACH

Abstract

This article is dedicated to my beloved mother, Zofia Kuzak, Honorary Member of the Polish Neuropsychological Society, and my highest moral authority, to honor her 100 th birthday. During the Nazi occu pation, at the age of 23, she was deport ed to Germany and forced into slave labour at a German camp, from which she managed to escape. During this escape she had to sit for three long days high up in a tree, without food and without anything to drink, something made possible by her strong physical condition. After three days, she dared to leave the tree and, in throwing the Nazis pursuing her, she ran away not to the South - to her home in Nowy Sącz, but to the North – to Poznań, where she took refuge in the apartment of other relatives, true Polish patriots. She stayed there for the years 1943–1947, keeping the accounts at the large family grocery store. The experiences from this period influenced the formation of her own self and her identity. Her stories about times of tragedy and her ways of dealing with the darkest moments in her life contributed to the fact that I became interested in the subject of the self and identity. I have prepared two monographs and several articles on this topic. This article presents a new approach to integrated self system, associated not only with the physical organism, but also with the social and cultural world. The foundation of this approach to the self is microgenetic theory, especially its account of consciousness, of the transition from self to image, act and object, the epochal nature of this transition, and its relation to introspection, imagination and agency. The affinities of microgenetic theory to many aspects of the thought process should be evident to readers of this journal, but the theory, which was developed from studies of pathological cases, rests on a wealth of clinical detail. In brief, the micro-temporal transition from archaic to recent formations (distributed systems) in the phyletic history of the forebrain constitutes the absolute mental state, with consciousness the relation of self to image and/or object. The reader will be able also to find here the overlapping of states, the continuity of the core over successive states, and subjective time experience. However, the integrated self system is associated not only with the operation of the biological brain and its complex patterns of neural connections, but also with the activity of the social mind/brain, in terms of bonds created within social groups, as well as the cultural mind/brain creating the world of cultural values, including religious ones. I will sum up with a model of self system changing in time (4D), pulsating according to the states of mind (5D) forming different numbers of “bits” of information, as marked on the x axis, and linked to the duration of memories, marked on the y axis. The self system also depends on gravity (6D), and other hyperspace dimensions hitherto unknown in neuroscience.